The more I’ve thought about how labour markets work, the more I’ve realised that there are hardly any jobs whose tasks you can describe exactly. Nowadays, most jobs have the property that employees can choose to do them well or badly, so employers need to think about the long-term welfare of the staff not just pay today.Dear God. He had to have a deep think to come up with that? "British management" has been an oxymoron during my lifetime, and that King should only just have achieved this blinding glimpse of the obvious, a mere 20 years after being hired as the chief economist of the Bank of England, is profoundly dispiriting.
It seems the Queen asked him, "If these things were so big, why did no one see them coming?" King says he replied:
Everyone did see it coming but no one knew when. It’s like an earthquake zone. You should be trying to build buildings in ways which are more robust. . . . I wish I’d spoken out more forcefully about the build-up of leverage.Do I need to underline how pathetic that reply is from the Governor of the Bank of England? So he saw it coming but didn't have the guts to make public what "everyone" knew and which it was his duty to denounce. "I wish" is a chicken-shit expression of regret for having failed absolutely to do what he could to avert the calamity.
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Any one with sense saw it coming but so many of them thought that they could avoid it. Little pensioners like me knew that they couldn't so we were like rabbits on the lawn while the storm surge gathered.
ReplyDeleteThe great Judas sages, Greensnot and Mervyn & Co. knew that their copperbottomed blue-chips would ride out the weather so what did they care if the rest of us took the beating from it? God bless you, Mervyn and Greenspan. I hope that the Hell Dante has described for the great Betrayers still has some room for the both of you. Not much central heating down there but lots of time to think.
The Spanish have the word for it: sinvergüenza. Or, more descriptively, hijo de puta.
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